2015 MCFLY TOWNHOUSE

Marty’s House Filming Location from Back to the Future part II

This location is in a GATED COMMUNITY. No Tresspassing Signs are Posted. ENTER THIS AREA AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Here it is! The future home of the McFly family! Of course, rewriting this now in 2013, it’s not as “future” as it used to be! In 2000, the locations from the first movie were widely available online. Part II and III were conspicuously absent. After trolling dozens of forums looking for information, I got a random email from a guy named Pat Evans who clued me in on this location!

For those of you who haven’t explored this location yet, The McFly house is located rather randomly in El Monte, California. One can only speculate as to why they chose this for the location, especially given that they used a different location to show “Hilldale” at the end of Part III, in 1985.

El Monte is, for the most part, not that nice of a town. I’m sorry to say it, but it’s true. It’s more than a little sketchy in places, and so when I first rolled up to explore this place I was a little nervous. Imagine my surprise when I showed up and found this pristine gated community in the middle of all that suburban decay.

Obviously all the set dressing is long gone from this condo, and it blends in well with it’s neighbors, so make sure you confirm the address before you snap your photos. I once went to Amityville and took a picture of the wrong “horror house” because I had heard it was remodeled and was trying to get in and out quickly. I was pretty bummed out with the results when I compared my photos with the ones on the internet. A little research goes a long way!

Well, we’re only two years away from 2015 now, and I’m sorry to report that the McFlys have yet to move in to the property. Instead, I found the same friendly-but-suspicious Asian family living here that I did back in 2000. The house hasn’t undergone any dramatic changes, however, and still makes for a great stop for the devoted Back to the Future fan.

Of course, having said that, I should say that this isn’t exactly a very memorable location to the eye, since the on-screen time of this particular unit was very slight, but we felt it warrants a separate page and a certain amount of attention because, come on, this is Marty Mc-Frickin-Fly’s house in 2015!!!!

As to my former rhetorical question about why they chose this location for the shoot, I think I figured it out. In 2001, Michael J Burmeister, a location scout who worked on both sequels, helped me to confirm a number of locations, and then kindly sent me some ancient document-turned-PDFs from the filming. In reading down the list of Paradox locations again, I realized the home or property owners are named in every instance except in the case of Hilldale 2015 and “Ext McFly Townhouse.”A homeowners association is listed, but no resident.

This leads me to speculate (wildly) that this development was probably brand new and mostly empty at the time. Which makes a lot of sense, given that no one would get super pissed that Doc and Marty are running up and down their street at 4am with huge floodlights, loud cameras, a time-machine-lifting crane, and probably some cliché megaphones.

Anyway, go see it for yourself, snap some photos, and give me a shout! We’re adding a brand new feature to the site to (finally!) display pictures all of you guys have shared with us over the years. We geek out when you geek out!